Legacies of Love

Tape One, Side One
Why Animal Loss is Different
Animals love unconditionally
Animal death is trivialized by many
Prejudice that we should not love or grieve for animals as much as humans
Responsibility and stress of the euthanasia decision
 
Tape One, Side Two
Understanding Your Grief
Three choices when faced with grief: deny, cope & survive, or truly heal
How to understand and heal complicated grief
Seven factors which make each grief experience unique
Using this knowledge to help us heal
 
Tape Two, Side One
Healing Your Grief: Three Necessary Components of Grief Recovery
Coping and finding comfort: Taking supportive action in honor of yourself
Completing emotional unfinished business: Facing and resolving guilt and anger
Creation - Moving on and transforming grief into growth:
Identifying, celebrating and integrating the gifts of the relationship, the legacies of love, into our way of being
 
Tape Two, Side Two
Healing Meditation
Purpose: To help you feel closer to the spiritual essence of your animal loved one
To more easily accept letting go of the physical relationship
To increase your sense of serenity and ability to experience the pain of loss with grace, not suffering. Includes an original score of soothing meditation music

Stephanie LaFarge, Ph.D., Director of Counseling Services
American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals:
"The best book on pet loss I've ever read.I recommend it to all who seek my help. This extraordinary audiobook is for everyone. Listening to Wagner's message will protect the bereaved from overwhelming despair. It will inspire all of us to reach toward a fuller recovery."

Cat Fancy 
"... gives grieving pet owners a plan for healing... ideal for people who prefer a live voice to text."

Dog World 
"... explodes the myth that loving and losing an animal is not as significant or painful as loving and losing a human. The gentle words and soothing music provide inspirational and practical guidance for both immediate coping and long-term healing."

Judy Tatelbaum, author of The Courage to Grieve:
"Compassionately offers understanding, comfort, and help for anyone facing the loss of a beloved pet."

Penelope Smith, author of Animals, Our Return to Wholeness: 
"A marvelous double audio cassette giving three hours of valuable guidance to compassionately and gracefully help people through the grieving process. Teresa's voice is warm and clear. Her style is loving and thorough. She details how to cope, love and care for ourselves as we grieve, how to examine and clear emotions surrounding the animal's death and how to heal and find meaning in loss."

Carol Staudacher, author of Beyond Grief and Men and Grief:
"Wagner's profound experience with grief, and with those who grieve, has created the foundation for her extremely wise and hopeful Legacies of Love. In this indispensable guide, Teresa Wagner offers understanding to survivors while providing them with both vital information and creative inspiration. This is a rich and in-depth resource for anyone who is dealing with the loss of an animal loved one."

Barbara Derbin Reitz, MSW, LCSW:
"Fills a gap in the animal loss literature ... and offers a new message in a profound way. Finally, someone has integrated the psychological and spiritual aspects of grief recovery with grounded intelligence and tender compassion. Bravo!"  

Kim Lanham-Snyder, Director of Operations, Marin Humane-Society:
"Touching, moving, inspiring. An inspiration and opportunity for personal reflection. Listening to your genuine words of compassion reassured by beliefs and touched my heart. Your soft gentle voice expressed the compassion shared throughout the tapes. The entire content was brilliant and admirably detailed." 

"I was inspired by the concept of 'love without limits' in the section on loving across species—comforting and beautiful!
Marijane Michalowicz, Medford Lakes, NJ

"Very realistic, powerful and helpful advice. While it is very educational, it lets the listener know that you are truly speaking from your heart and that you have definitely been there."
Jacqueline Ellis, Portland, OR

"The guided meditation is a very gentle, nurturing way to approach and embrace that which is so profoundly painful and scary... to finally acknowledge the passing of the beloved."
Donna Ferina, Albany, CA

"Your words have been a "bible" to me. They go with me everywhere, because when I feel a wave of pain I glance through your words and I know I'm not nutty for feeling this crazy pain."
Brooke Emsley, W. Boothbay, ME

"Teresa's voice was so loving and wonderful to hear and she makes me remember how much I'm loved by God and all those around me."
Maureen Averett, New Berlin, N

Legacies of Love: A Gentle Guide to Healing from the Loss of Your Animal Loved One

by Teresa Wagner

Most of us need experiences of unconditional love from others to learn to feel safe and secure, to know we have a place in the world, and in order to learn to love ourselves. It's from animals that so many of us learn to feel deserving of unconditional love, and learn how to love ourselves. In their ability to profoundly love without condition, animals give us this gift. It is no wonder we grieve deeply from the separation of physical death. It's all right to acknowledge that your animal gave you something humans do not. This does not diminish your human relationships. It honors the unique gifts your animal gave you and this is an important step in healing your grief.

When we are grieving, we are wounded, more vulnerable, and more easily influenced and sensitive to others' comments and behavior. In an ideal world, at our times of grief we would be surrounded by those who deeply care, understand, and accept the depth of our loss. But the world is not ideal and on top of our grief we often have the less than helpful actions of others to deal with. Though others may have not yet have learned it, you know that grief is indifferent to the species lost. Know this in your heart to be true, and don't let the differing beliefs of others sully the real love you have for your animal, or diminish your experience of grief. Your grief is legitimate and real, regardless of anyone else's comments, behavior, or opinion. Seek the support of people who understand your experience and accept your feelings. Sometimes this will be close friends or family, and sometimes it may mean reaching out to acquaintances who you know love animals as you do. It may mean finding a support group, calling a hotline, seeing a counselor (whose values about animals are not in contradiction to yours), visiting a web site, reading a book, or attending a workshop. Whatever support actions you chose, know that without a doubt your loss is real, your feelings are real, and you deserve a time of grief and recovery.

Finally, don't let anyone — not your best friend, your family, priest, minister, rabbi, author or co-worker — influence you to believe that your love for animals is in any way wrong, or not as important as your relationship with humans. We can't control others' behavior or values but we can choose not to internalize any message they send which may be ignorant or disrespectful. Your relationship with animals is a blessing of love. Cherish it, be proud of your ability to love without limits.

One day as I was preparing the ideas and script for these tapes, I accidentally came across a cat bed which had belonged to my beloved cat Katie. I hadn't seen it since her death more than a year before. As I looked at it I realized it had never been laundered and was still covered with her fur. Oh God, oh God that funny, horrible, empty feeling in the pit of my stomach came back and tears flowed as easily as they did at the time of her death. The shock of her being gone was momentarily back. I was hit with the fact that she is gone. She'd never be in this bed again — and yet here is her fur, her lovely, beautiful fur. Within moments, I also felt her spirit in the room, calming my pain, reminding me that her spirit didn't die, that her essence is still here, all around me. And just as this sweet, gentle, yet powerful reminder washed over me, a song began on the radio — Because You Loved Me, sung by Celine Dion and written by Diane Warren. As I cried remembering my Katie, the powerful words and music filled me with gratitude for the great gifts and experiences we gave each other. The words of this song could easily be spoken by us to our animals or by our animals to us: You were my strength when I was weak. You were my voice when I couldn't speak. I'm everything I am, because you loved me.

Yes, we are often who we are, transformed, better, more fully alive and whole, because our animals loved us and we loved them. Those of us who have deeply loved and lost animals know that experiencing love and the true meaning of family transcend differences of not only race, gender, and culture but of species too.

For some of us, animals provide the brightest light on earth. When they leave their light remains, still shining with splendor in our hearts, in acts of kindness, and in all of nature. Remember this and let it warm you.

The goal of grief recovery is to heal the heart and to use the crisis of loss to grow. Healing the heart means understanding and lessening feelings of pain, confusion, resentment or other difficult emotions, while strengthening a sense of acceptance and peace around our loss. Using the crisis to grow means identifying and cherishing the mutual gifts of the relationship, fully embracing the lessons emerging from the loss, and consciously choosing to use them in our lives. Integrating the gifts and lessons of the relationships into our way of being may be the finest tribute we can make to our animal loved ones. Grief recovery is not just feelings better, it is becoming more whole. It is a conscious choice to heal and grow. And as we journey through our healing process, it can help to dispel some myths about grieving.

One common myth about grief we often hear is "you'll get over it." We don't "get over" grief, it becomes part of who we are. Getting over something connotes that we can let it go from our lives as if nothing significant has happened — that we can snap out of it, forget it, and perhaps even easily replace what was lost. Allowing, on the other hand, our grief to become part of who we are doesn't mean we live in a state of grief forever. It means that rather than pretend nothing traumatic has happened, we can face what has happened squarely and with courage, and attempt to learn to accept death and loss as part of our life. Moving on from an intense experience such as grief without fully processing it's meaning is not fully living — it's pretending. So we don't "get over" grief, but we can consciously heal from it, and move on in our lives with deepened meaning from the experience.

A second myth is that we can heal our grief exclusively from either an emotional or a spiritual frame of reference, that we do not have to address both. Grief is an emotionally painful process. There are deep and poignant feelings to be faced and dealt with. Yet it is a spiritual process also. Psychological work helps us heal feelings, to feel consoled, but it is only work of the spirit which allows us to find meaning, to see the bigger picture, and find answers to our questions about life and death. It is in both completing our emotional unfinished business along with embracing our spirituality that we find peace.

Approaching our grief with only a spiritual perspective can create an unhealthy bypass of emotions, pretending our feelings will go away simply because we've spiritually accepted the death. This doesn't work. Strong feelings don't disappear, they just go underground and come back to haunt us later, pushing us to recognize and heal them. Strong spiritual beliefs do not eliminate our need to heal emotionally. But what they can do, powerfully and beautifully, is shift the basic quality, the very character of our emotional pain so it is experienced not with suffering, but with grace. Processing our feelings brings us emotional clarity and completion. Embracing our spirituality brings us the opportunity for peace and grace. We need and deserve both.

A third myth is that time heals all wounds. Time does not heal emotional wounds. The passage of time merely lessens the intensity of our pain, or allows us to escape it through new activities or relationships. Only conscious intent truly heals, not time alone. Healing our grief is not a passive process. The often described stages of grief such as shock, anger, suffering and disorganization, depression, and acceptance, can help us understand the range of emotions we feel, normalizing our experience. But if we merely wait for the stages of grief to pass through us, we're taking a passive, reactive stance in regard to our loss, making us even less empowered than we may already feel after a major loss. It takes proactive, conscious intent to heal grief. When we have a physical wound, if we allow only the passage of time to heal it, with no medication, it may scar over, our body may still function, but the area may always be tender and may not function fully. The same is true of our grief. We can allow time to carry us to a phase of less pain, to allow us to bury the hurt as we become involved in activity, but we're not really healed then, just scarred over, and not fully functioning. Though healing is certainly not a linear experience that we can control and manage like a project, healing is an intentional process that we can navigate instead of passively waiting to get better. Just as the captains of ships cannot control weather or waves, but nevertheless go to sea prepared to navigate their journey versus merely being as the mercy of the elements, we too, can skillfully navigate our journey through grief and arrive enriched in a place of great peace. We'll talk soon about some very specific tools we can use to navigate our journeys successfully.

If you like the use of visual metaphor, you may enjoy imaging your journey of grief occurring as a trip over a humpback bridge. A teacher of mine, Evelyn Isadore, had a beautiful Asian painting of a humpback bridge in her office. She used to tell her students that true healing from life problems and hurts entailed mustering the faith and courage to cross the humpback bridge of transition. You see, when first stepping onto a humpback bridge, we can't see anything but the highly steeped bridge ahead and deep water below. We can't see the other side and the walk to the top seems arduous. To get across we must first go straight uphill. We can get scared and stay stuck at our first step onto the bridge. We can even give up and jump into the waters. Or we can garner support and comfort in every way we know to help us keep walking over the bridge. Once at the top, the vista is clear, wide, peaceful and all encompassing. From this vantage point of the big picture we can see the past from where we've come and the possibilities for our future. Looking upward we can see the face of God in the sky; looking downward we can see our true selves reflected in the water. From this place we can much more easily complete unfinished business, and we can see the lessons and gifts from where we've come. The journey downhill from the top is almost effortless, giving us time to recover from our steep climb and to integrate all we've leaned, preparing us to reach the other side more whole, ready to move on.

These three distinct components of the journey over the bridge — mustering the strength and courage to just keep going, going far and high enough to see the whole picture to come to completion, and time to integrate our leaning before moving on — can be likened to the three necessary components of grief recovery:

Coping and Finding Comfort
Completion: Completing Emotional Unfinished Business
Creation: Moving on and Transforming Grief Into Growth

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